The article examines the dual outcome of Latin intervocalic /p t k/ in Old Tuscan. While these stops remain voiceless in most of the Tuscan lexicon, a significant number of words are voiced. The prevailing opinion is that preservation of voicelessness is the native outcome, and that the words displaying voicing were borrowed from Romance languages in which intervocalic voicing was systematic. However, a number of facts militate against this hypothesis, including the presence of voicing in Tuscan words that are unattested or maintain a voiceless stop in the supposed donor languages. The results of a corpus-based analysis of an Old Tuscan lexicon show that the distribution of the voiced outcomes is phonologically conditioned (contra the borrowing hypothesis), as they are more likely if the stop was velar, next to low(er) vowels, next to stress and if followed by a liquid consonant. These results are also an example of sound change with clear and fine-grained phonological conditioning but a non-systematic outcome; irregularity was probably caused by the allophonic nature of Old Tuscan voicing and by its interaction with another lenition process.

The origin and nature of ‘irregular', ‘sporadic' sound changes have been debated by different theories of phonological change since at least the Neogrammarians. They are often attributed to non-phonological factors, as analogy or borrowing, or to the non-(purely)-phonological mechanism of lexical diffusion. The aim of this paper is to show that an irregular sound change in the historical phonology of Tuscan - namely the voicing of some intervocalic voiceless stops - is not due to borrowing (as often argued), but to a variable and allophonic voicing rule, whose output was only partially subject to phonological recategorization. The most likely causes for this irregular outcome are the variable strength intervocalic voicing had in different environments, the interaction with another lenition process and the perceptual ambiguity of the lenited stops.

The goal of this paper is to describe a (morpho)phonological process attested in the Romance dialect of the Ticino Canton (Switzerland) and to discuss its relevance to theories of phonological features. In this dialect all stressed front vowels are raised stepwise, and stressed back vowels are fronted. The actual nature of the phonological feature(s) involved is not obvious and provides relevant material to compare the predictions of different feature theories. Whereas standard binary features represent Ticino metaphony as the accidental combination of various unrelated processes, feature systems representing vowel height as a multivalued feature, as well as the phonological primes of Dependency/ Particle/Government Phonology, can describe its alternations as a uniform process.

In Central Italy several dialects display post-tonic regressive vowel harmony, by which post-tonic vowels copy all the features of the word-final vowel. On the basis of phonetic and phonological arguments I argue that the penultimate vowel of proparoxytones, the typical target of this process, is a prosodically weak position, which makes it a good target for assimilation. In some dialects harmony is active only if a liquid consonant intervenes between the trigger and target vowels; since in these dialects liquids do not contrast for place, underspecification can explain this asymmetry. Since place specification of non-liquid consonants is required in other varieties, which nevertheless display harmony across any intervening consonant, following Clements (2001) I argue that in this case some nodes of feature geometry are not active.

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